Anchorage Press has just issued a trade edition of my poems, Ova Aves, which accompany photographs of bird eggs by Thaddeus Holownia. This suite of thirteen ghazal-like poems—a baker’s dozen—began with photographs of eggs from the Biology Department collection at Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick, where Gay Hansen, the photographer’s partner, teaches ornithology. The eggs comprise a random selection of species, which nevertheless presents a broad range of bird types: waterbirds, seabirds, shorebirds, raptors, and songbirds. One commonality is that most of these species are found where the photographer and poet live, on the Tantramar Marsh, in the border region between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. This is one of the richest areas for birdlife in Maritime Canada, where more than 200 species commonly nest. One of these birds, the Northern Harrier (Circus cyaneus), is iconic to the Tantramar. I have seen all of the species in the field with the exception of the Emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae) which is native toAustralia.
The eggs are identified as to species (otherwise their utility to science is limited) but for one labeled “unknown.” Art does not require its provenance to be known, for what is not known can be supplied by the imagination, which is used here in the sense defined by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous, Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World as “an attribute of the senses themselves… not a separate mental faculty.”
When I looked closely at the egg labeled “Unknown” I saw the suggestion of a long-legged waterbird scrawled vertically on the shell. (Gay Hansen explains in the introduction to the poems how these random markings are produced of blood and bile as the egg gestates.) This image sent me in search of the origin of language and its visual expression—writing.
When I began work on these poems I had recently returned from Egypt. I had been reading Herodotus’ The Histories, and thinking about this early civilization’s role in the origin of writing, which, in the Egyptian case, is so richly visual.
In Egyptian cosmology, the inventor of writing, or hieroglyphs, is an ibis-headed god called Thoth, who was worshipped as the universal Demiurge, the divine ibis who had hatched the world-egg. It was said that it accomplished this work of creation solely by the sound of its voice.
I liked the Egyptian notion that writing derived from birds, specifically from the Sacred Ibis (Threshkiornis aethiopica). I especially liked the fact that this facility derived from a bird with an ink-coloured head. The image that words poured directly from the head through the pen-like beak, as birdsong does, seemed right.
In The Histories, jet black ibises lay in wait in a narrow mountain pass for the annual migration of winged snakes from Arabia toEgypt. The ibises met this winged horde and killed them—Herodotus claims to have seen the snakes’ bones—which is why the birds are sacred to the Egyptians. Myth? As I say in the poem, “Believe what you must.”
At the same time, I was reading The Names of Things, Life, Language, and Beginnings in the Egyptian Desert by Susan Brind Morrow, who had worked in the Dakhleh Oasis, in the Western Desert, where I had also lately been researching a book (Island of the Blessed, The Secret’s of Egypt’s Everlasting Oasis). She had returned toEgypt many times in a compulsive search for “the origins of myth, the roots of words,” and had realized their source was “the natural world… the wilderness.”
In Egypt, Morrow asserts “the passage of nature into language… had to do with the eye.” She notes that flamingo is the hieroglyph for red, and that “all red things: anger, blood, the desert are spelled with flamingo.” In support of that assertion about the direct relationship between language and the eye, she quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: “… the poet names the thing because he sees it…”
The theme of language surfaces in several poems in Ova Aves. As I say of the Northern Raven (Corvus corax), a bird capable of speech: “You hatch the word, the original mischief.”